You can be sad for six months. Then mad. And even glad.
You can spend months trying to unknot the grief you carry around and get absolutely nowhere and have no way to explain how you can feel all these things all the time and they’re all directly linked to losing very important sources of love in your life.
And then, one random morning in April, you can hear a somewhat syrupy and gimmicky Katy Perry song and declare it your own personal anthem for the next 48 hours while driving your entire family crazy by playing it loudly. And often. Then you can declare yourself officially “through the worst of it” and you can even believe yourself, as long as you allow the grace and understanding to realize you’re likely going to relapse back into the sad and mad now and again without rhyme or reason.
You can finally agree to the terms of grief: there are no terms. It’s messy and hellish and confusing. Have fun!
You can do all of that and nobody can stop you because you’re an adult, you’ve gone through one hell of a two-year roller coaster ride of loss, grief, and growth, and there’s literally no rulebook saying how these sorts of things must unfold.
Mine seems to be the messiest, least organized of the griefs, and I think that was the hardest part of the whole thing.
In the summer of 2021, my mom’s dementia spiked after a period of “recovery” in an assisted living center where she fell out of her wheelchair and onto her face no less than four times in one week. It didn’t take long for her systems to shut down after that and when my dad called to say “it’s soon,” he was right. It was within 24 hours, actually.
She was gone quickly and I sit with her ashes in my hallway to this day, still working out our last big adventure together.
The following summer, my son went to college and moved (permanently) out west. We said some really sad goodbyes that a week later were overshadowed by the sudden loss of one gorgeous Irish Setter named Ruby. My little red-headed best friend.
This isn’t a rehash of any of that, only an examination of how bumpy of a ride its been in the 22 months since Deb died and the seven months since Dominic moved on and Ruby passed.
I tend to overdo things and in the thick of it all, I really felt like somehow I’d screwed up along the way to deserve all this loss and heartbreak in one heaping spoonful. Don’t most heartbreaks happen on nice, evenly-spaced intervals?
Apparently not.
This is not a how-to on grief, either. This is merely an observation that grief isn’t linear or straightforward and for weeks, you can feel like so much of life is pointless if it all ends randomly and traumatically.
And then you can read a column from your favorite writer. You can hear a song you probably avoided on purpose along the way, but today was the day that hit you and your dancing feet right when it was supposed to.
And in early April, on a day that’s colder than you’d like but one without snow (finally!) you can come to terms with all the things you’ve felt along the way, you can make room for the things to come, and you can feel absolutely fine about all of it.
Finally.